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Between the Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é refletir sobre a
historicidade das formas disciplinares, investigando os
disciplinary past
critérios que balizaram as condições de emergência da
disciplina histórica, assim como seus atuais (possíveis)
esgotamento e crise. Em uma conjuntura em que a cultura
and the practical histórica se difunde por meio de diferentes mídias, nas quais
se valoriza muito mais a fragmentação e a pluralização,
past: figurations
via memória, do que uma homogeneização, via história
disciplinar, torna-se importante investigar os modos pelos
quais os historiadores hoje redefinem sua identidade,
DOI: 10.1590/TEM-1980-542X2018v240201
186-205
“Every epoch should always
try to rip tradition from the sphere
of conformism which
prepares to dominate it”.
– Walter Benjamin
W
e are going currently through an intense discussion about the working conditions
of historians and the place of the discipline of history and of the humanities
in society.1 An unmistakable sign of this are projects, in various countries, for
the remodeling of the teaching system, aimed at the reduction of the number of hours of
the humanities, or even their extinction, in the name of a pedagogy concerned with the
abilities required by a market going through an accelerated transformation. Similarly,
a sensitive reduction in investments in the humanities in the university system can be
perceived, under the increasingly common justification of their “uselessness” in relation to
more practical sciences (Ordine, 2016; Nussbaum, 2015). Not by chance, a possible “end of
history” is considered today as something concrete, not in the sense given to it by Fukuyama
at the beginning of the 1990s, but in relation to the disciplinary sense, and with this also
a consequent “end of historians” (Léon; Martin, 2008). It is the institutional face of the
humanities and their social role, as has existed since the nineteenth century, which now
seems to be in danger of extinction.
Rather than reacting by brandishing the supposed virtues inherent to historical
knowledge, based on determined common places inherited from tradition, it is perhaps
the moment for the discipline to also carry out its own self-analysis, seeking to think
with — and in opposition to — the tradition which constituted it, as a condition of the
preparation of a new disciplinary imagination. The aim of this text is to test some paths
for this reflection, trying at the same time to draw a broad temporal arc which will allow
the visualization of both the emergency conditions and the crisis in the disciplinary form
of history, in the broader field of the humanities, as well as the tensions, clashes, and
conflicts which now surround the reconfiguration of the place of the discipline and its
identity. The central argument I have sought to develop in the three movements which
compose this paper is aimed at identifying how the exhaustion of original conditions of
the emergence of the discipline ended up making it face a dual pressure, both external
and internal. Externally, in relation to the new configurations between state-society-
university in the accelerated and globalized world of late capitalism, occurring in specific
policies for evaluating and devaluing historiographic production and of the humanities
1
This text is the fruit of reflections carried out in a cycle of meetings “(In)disciplined history”, held in UFRGS. I would
like to thank all the participants for their valuable criticisms and suggestions, as well as my colleagues Pedro Caldas,
Mateus Henrique de Faria Pereira, Aline Magalhães, Martin Wiklund, Thiago Nicodemo, Géssica Gaio, and Arthur Assis
for the critical reading of previous versions of the paper.
The second report, dedicated to the “professions of the future”, concentrates on showing
new opportunities which can be explored by historians, more specifically by the category
of “corporate historians”, in the preparation of “memory solution” archives and strategies
for companies. This activity demands, on the one hand, the (supposed) technical abilities
of the historian with archives and, on the other, a degree of astuteness to understand the
demands of companies and their insertion in the market, in relation to which they need to
offer the above mentioned “memory solutions”. It also contextualizes these demands within
an actual intensification of academic studies about memory. As one of the interviewees
states, a trained historian and with a postgraduate degree in administration:
The search for the memory of post-modern society has been countering the
acceleration of time. I think that memory serves a little to nurture individual
and collective identity and to attribute meanings to reality. Thus, the role of
the historian is to give this a use. It is not worth making memories for memory.
You have to give this a use (Estadão, 2015).
In the justifications prepared for the reform of second level education in Brazil, in an
analogous manner, the vocabulary in which this process has been expressed is still revealing:
the student idealized in these projects needs to “acquire basic skills” in order to develop the
“flexibility” necessary for a market in continual and accelerated transformation. It is with these
principles, following the PISA model, (Programme for International Student Assessment),
using the OECD database, which legitimates dominion in the broad areas of mathematics
and language, conceived as the most appropriate “instruments” for this new form of purpose
without purpose, flexibility. Instead of notions such as “formation” and “development”,
on which pedagogical projects in classical modernity were based, and which indicate a
determined conception of subjectivity, as well as temporality, we can see the sedimentation
of new categories which reveal distinct forms of subjectivities and historicity. The already
mentioned notion of “flexibility”, for example, which is at the center of this process, is
characterized by a spatial-temporal opening without any telos. It is about the capacity for
reaction (more than action) to a state of continuous and hyper-accelerated movement, but
which is not directed at any specific place. Not by chance, this concept has become ever
more current in society from the 1980s onwards, first with economic and work organization
vocabulary, replacing the rigidity of the Fordist model, and afterwards expanding to other
It is well known that the discipline of history is a modern phenomenon. Before the nineteenth
century, it was distributed in a series of distinct genres, involving different protocols of
reading and writing, distinct erudite practices, and meeting various purposes, classified
in the treaties as belonging to the epididytic genre, with nuances in the deliberative and
judicial genres. The choice of writing a historic text, in this broad sense, is presented as
one possibility amongst others, not implying a specific delimitation or delimitation of
the person who wrote. Furthermore, the voice of the historian was assumed rather than
being a historian. The delimitation was thus more in the specific genres than in the agent
strictly speaking. Similarly, there was no project or institution of “historical education”,
in the school sense. Even with the formation of academies in the eighteenth century, this
type of functioning of the machinery of genres, according to Alcir Pécora’s useful phrase,
was not essentially altered.
This would only actually occur with the shaping of a disciplinary logic from the nineteenth
century onwards, later crystalized in the reforms that would result in the profile of the
modern university. In this process, which occurred in distinct modes and at specific times
in different countries, the delimitation of the authority of the text stopped being anchored
on eminently rhetorical protocols to be definition by the formation of a specific agent, the
historian, through the implementation of an obligatory curriculum and recognized emblems
and titles. In this process, the abilities and certain epistemic virtues which qualified this
subject of knowledge were defined, predominantly centered on documental critique and
impartiality, as well as the genres through historians could express themselves, such as the
monographic book, articles, and reviews, governed by specific protocols which translated
those abilities and virtues, constituting what Anthony Grafton called the “dual narrative”
(Grafton, 1998).
As Peter Weingart has highlighted, the emergence of the modern disciplines, occurring
around 1800, implied a distinct mode of producing experiences or data, which came to be
generated and controlled through primarily internal protocols, and no longer occasional
ones (Weingart, 2010). In other words, the judgement of the relevance of a research agency,
as well as the forms of its execution, became rules for peers, institutionalizing a hierarchical
chain of formation and reproduction in this relatively autonomous space. It is in this sense
that Weingart defines the essence and the evolution of disciplines through self-referential
communication, normally established through congresses, associations, and periodicals.
Generating a spiral of specialization, while at the same time research innovation was
associated with teaching, the disciplines were, at least ideally, oriented by the principle of
autonomy, since the opening which characterized the research was based on the production
of novelties which could not and should not be defined beforehand. It is in this sense that
Third movement: between the historical past and the practical past
Given this wide temporal arc which marks the conditions of emergence and the crisis of
the discipline of history, I would like to present a brief reflection about recent debates in
Brazil, involving the profession of the historian and the preparation of a single national
curriculum. The aim here is not to make a detailed and verticalized analysis, linking texts and
authors, but rather to perceive the general orientation of the arguments that the category has
prepared in this crisis, taking into account its institutional place of enunciation, the National
Association of History (Associação Nacional de História —ANPUH), and thus to contribute to
a broader reflection on the tensions of the figuration of contemporary disciplinary identity.2
The debate about the professionalization of the historian, despite having a long trajectory,
is currently centered on a bill going through the Brazilian congress. It is intended to regulate
the profession of the historian, defining certain minimum conditions for the university
formation necessary for the exerciser of the activity, as well as the need for bodies and
institutions to have in their staff, professionals qualified in accordance with the regulations,
if they exercise any type of “service in history” (a term from the bill). What this “service in
history” actually specifies is not stated, though the term in itself appears to indicate a concern
with approximating the profession with contemporary market tendencies, with the “services
sector”, marked both by the diversification of medias and spaces for the consumption of the
past, as by continuous transformations in labor posts; also resulting in the impossibility of
determining beforehand in a “bill” what could specific work in “services in history”.
2
All the texts from the ANPUH site were accessed in August 2016.
3
The recent sequestration of BNCC by the National Congress represented the end of dissensus, being resolved in a
heteronomous and equally authoritarian manner.
4
The tension between a disciplinary past and a practical past is marked, for example, in the speech given by Rodrigo
Patto, then president of ANPUH, to the members of the Association, delimiting the distinction between the professional
historian and the amateur one: “The distinction lies in the fact that history operates with scientific procedures, follows a
method, is based on the critique of sources and the search for diversified evidence. The historian should be skeptical
of their sources, should investigate them in search of truth, a target which is unattainable in the pure sense, but which
can still present to the public a more critical and reflexive knowledge. We can also satisfy the curiosity and the need
for the entertainment of the general public, but with the peculiarity of including the “special treat” in the package, in
other words leading the reader to critical reflection”, (Patto, 2016).
Defending the university implies, ultimately, through languages which belong to them,
also defending another idea of society. In a context of the fragmentation of the public sphere,
perhaps it is also worth thinking of the university as a possible place for the preparation
and expansion of languages and, thus, as an element which is a component of the public
sphere, no longer the figure of the solitary intellectual, but as a center which channels
various social demands and groups. The democratization of the university thus becomes not
only a desirable ethical and political element, but also something that composes the actual
theoretical legitimation of the humanities, since it is democratization which will finally
generate, through disciplinary autonomy and the communicative combat, the complexification
of the languages for the description of the world through which society, and consequently
the humanities themselves, can be thought of beyond their immediate present, opening
them to a future not given in advance. Even though there is a certain institutional inertia
in disciplines and even though their corporatism imposes a temporality in which changes
do not suddenly happen, accepting them at any cost from specific external interference can
signify the choice of the end of what is most fundamental in the university and space and the
disciplinary form: the possibility of opening for what is not given in advance. Including the
opening for the preparation of new and unpredictable languages, even more in a world so
lacking in the imagination of futures. However, for this, it is necessary not only to confront
what comes from outside the disciplinary tradition, but the tradition itself. After all, as
Humboldt stated: “[University] autonomy is threatened not only by the state, but also by
the actual [university] institutions when, in assuming a determined orientation, they impede
the orientation of any other” (Humbold, 2003, p. 87).